The US Senate Intelligence Committee is writing up a report highly critical of the CIA’s past use of torture on detainees, including “waterboarding,” even as the Obama administration has ramped up the use of deadly drone strikes.

One of President Barack Obama’s campaign promises was to put an
end to torture, euphemistically described as “enhanced
interrogation techniques” under the presidency of former US
president, George W. Bush.

Led by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the Democrat-majority
Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI) has been tasked with
investigating CIA counterterrorism methods, which included
so-called ‘extraordinary rendition’. This involved the capture of
suspects who were then covertly transported to third country
‘black sites’, believed to be located in a handful of Eastern
European countries.

At these facilities, the “unlawful enemy combatants”
were subjected to various interrogation techniques, including
waterboarding, sleep deprivation and humiliation.

The report is expected to conclude that the CIA’s interrogation
methods, which the Obama administration discontinued in 2009
under considerable pressure from human rights groups, failed to
retrieve “critical intelligence” from the detainees.

"Clandestine 'black sites' and coercive interrogation
techniques were terrible mistakes that damaged our reputation,
angered our allies and did not produce actionable intelligence
that was not achievable through non-coercive tactics,"
Feinstein said.

A slip into darkness

Before the Bush administration opened its so-called War on
Terror, following the attacks of 9/11, the United States, as far
as anybody could tell, was not in the torture business. However,
America’s moral standing suffered a setback when news of the
rendition flights and black hole sites first grabbed headlines.

In 2006, an EU committee reported that European countries have
been "turning a blind eye" to flights operated by the CIA which,
"on some occasions, were being used for extraordinary
rendition or the illegal transportation of detainees".

“At least 1,245 flights operated by the CIA flew into
European airspace or stopped over at European airports between
the end of 2001 and the end of 2005”. The MEPs emphasized,
however, that “not all those flights have been used for
extraordinary rendition.”

In some cases, the report continues, "temporary secret
detention facilities in European countries may have been located
at US military bases".

"There may have been a lack of control" over such bases
by European host countries, it added.

Another aspect of the SSCI investigation is that no ‘black site’
location has ever been positively identified. However, in January
2012, Poland's Prosecutor General's office initiated
investigative proceedings against Zbigniew Siemiątkowski, the
former Polish intelligence chief charged with facilitating the
alleged CIA detention operation in Poland.

CIA questions the findings

Meanwhile, the CIA is challenging “significant aspects”
of the Senate Intelligence Committee draft, alleging that
Feinstein’s committee failed to interview “key
witnesses”, including CIA agents involved in the handling of
the terror suspects, Reuters reported.

This apparent oversight prompted the CIA to present its
objections in written form, as well as in meetings with SSCI
members.

The CIA has taken the position that the Senate committee is
incorrect in its assertion that controversial interrogation
techniques, like waterboarding, and the black site detention
centers produced no valuable intelligence in the effort to foil
future terrorist attacks.

John Brennan, the CIA's current director, was a top agency
official when the CIA interrogation techniques were a routine
part of intelligence work. In closed-door meetings with Congress,
Brennan pointed out that the SSCI report contained “major
inaccuracies”, Reuters reported, quoting anonymous
officials.

The CIA supported the claim.

"Our response agreed with a number of the study's findings,
but also detailed significant errors in the study. Since that
time, CIA and Committee staff have had extensive dialogue on this
issue and the Agency is prepared to work with the Committee to
determine the best way forward on potential
declassification," said CIA spokesman Dean Boyd.

Feinstein said she was prepared to include some the agency’s
comments in the report.

"We are in the very final stages of incorporating some of the
CIA's response into the report, though the key findings and
conclusions remain highly critical of the CIA's past detention
and interrogation activities," she said in a statement.

The report is expected to be finished by the end of the year,
although it is still not known if the public will be permitted to
see the final report.

What about drone warfare?

In conclusion, the ongoing deliberations between the Senate
Intelligence Committee and the CIA appears to be ignoring a
gnawing question regarding Washington’s ongoing war on terror: is
it better to whisk a suspected terrorist out of his bed in the
dead of night to some ‘black site’ detention facility where
torture is routine practice, or just liquidate the suspect in a
drone strike?

Or is it a moot question, given that neither option is
particularly attractive, especially when it is considered that
the perpetrator of these acts regularly refers to itself as the
defender of democracy around the world?

The Obama administration, which has resorted to the use of
drones with far more frequency than the Bush administration,
may be innocent of torture, but it still has a lot of innocent
blood on its hands.

On Thursday, 15 people who had been traveling to a wedding in
Yemen were mistaken for an Al-Qaeda convoy and killed in a
drone strike.

“An air strike missed its target and hit a wedding car
convoy; ten people were killed immediately and another five who
were injured died after being admitted to the hospital,” a
Yemeni security official told Reuters.